wiredInUSA October 2016

An end to strikes

New York Power Authority (NYPA) will use Vesper Marine’s WatchMate asset protection system to protect a critical 7.5-mile stretch of four submerged cables in the Long Island Sound. The cables are buried 10 feet deep under the Sound, and twice have been seriously damaged by tugboat anchors. The repair process can take five to eight months and “tens of millions of dollars” to fix, according to Robert J Schwabe, director, asset and maintenancemanagement, NYPA. Cable strikes also bring a significant safety and environmental hazard: the repair process demands divers in the water to jet out the cable, find the break and bring it to surface, and the DCL 45 low viscosity fluid used for insulation within the cable poses an environmental risk.

were working in arduous conditions, taking two months to jet out enough cable to find the fault, while releasing thousands of gallons of DCL 45 fluid. The solution uses two land-based communication towers to establish a set of virtual beacons to mark the cable field, clearly visible on a commercial vessel’s electronic charts. The Vesper Maritime system monitors vessels constantly, and a set of web-based software rules, created by NYPA and Vesper, determine if a vessel is likely to anchor in the potential strike zone. A safety message is delivered automatically and directly to the bridge of the vessel and copied to NYPA. “There were other systems that offered notification, but they first notified the Coast Guard and then the vessel, which could take up to half an hour,” said Schwabe. “You don’t have that much time.”

The most recent anchor strike, in 2014, occurred in winter, meaning the divers

wiredInUSA - October 2016

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